


Drop of your Heart

by zyva



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Period typical attitudes mentioned, mentioned Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 09:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17241818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zyva/pseuds/zyva
Summary: Once, David had been used to seeing new teardrops appear on his arm. Then, they stopped.-o-The soulmate au where each time your soulmate cries, a teardrop appears on your skin.





	Drop of your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> tw for mentioned homophobia starting at: " _David was more than happy to spend his life with_ " and ending at " _David did his best to push those thoughts out of his head_ " It's short and only mentioned briefly in passing, but if it'll upset you, please don't read it! Equally - message me if you want any further details on it or would like me to warn against anything else :)
> 
> happy new years, everyone! hope you all have an incredible 2019 <33

Once, David had been used to seeing new teardrops appear on his arm. It was not something he saw every day, but he could expect a new one once every month or so. (His Mama told him that when he was a baby, new marks appeared sometimes several times a day. A few every day was normal; small children usually cried a lot and he was younger than his soulmate, so his marks had been collating since the day he was born). That was just how it was. 

Then, the teardrops started appearing at more and more distant intervals until David found one last new one at age nine. He was left with the two-hundred-and-sixty-three teardrops spread across his arms that told the tale of his soul mate’s childhood. The stopped after that.

It was an odd system. A teardrop, every time his soul mate cried, bloomed somewhere on his arms. Nearly everyone had them. David once thought he had seen a girl with two different colours of teardrops on her arms, but Mama had tightly grabbed his arm, pulled him away and told him not to stare. 

When he realised that he had not a new tear mark in months, David cried. Hugging him, his Aba told him that some people just did not cry much, and there was nothing to worry about. Either way, months stretched into years without another teardrop appearing on his arms.

Sometimes, jealousy bit his stomach and lungs when he saw the marks that appeared every few weeks on Les’s arms, or when Sarah found a new one that spotted just above her elbow. It was not that David wanted his soulmate to cry; he just wanted proof that they were still alive. Proof that he was not destined for a life of loneliness.  

Sometimes, school was brutal when the teachers lectured about soul marks in literature and then the class chattered about their newest tear marks at break. By the time he reached high school, it had been years since David’s last mark had appeared. Most people in his year still received one or two every few months.

At fifteen, David left school. Aba’s broken leg pushed their family from the poverty line to well below it. Gone were the days of maths and history and in were hours of making up newspaper headlines because interest in the trolley strike had long since run dry.  

When on the streets, the tear marks suddenly lost their meaning. No one had time to worry about whether or not their soul mate was crying when they were simply doing their best to earn their next night with a roof over their heads and food in their stomach. Somehow, David liked that. It was easy to lose himself in the rhythm of selling papers. The significance of the teardrop on Jane Eyre’s arm was as irrelevant as the lack of new marks on his own.

The strike was a reality check, though. Gruelling days, trying to change something in their small circle of the world. David’s evenings changed to talking with his Aba, learning everything he could about strikes. If ‘brains-of-the-operation’ had become David’s name for the sake of their protest, then the least he could do was try to know what he was talking about.

Somewhere along the line, it all seemed to go wrong. Brooklyn did not come. Crutchie was taken. A teardrop appeared right below the knuckle of his left thumb, which Les noticed before anyone else. He grabbed David’s hand and stared at it like he had never seen it before.

David tried to tug his hand away, but Les held on tightly. Around them, only a few Newsies were still milling around the streets. They looked as if they had lost their purpose, now that their protest had been beaten into the ground and Jack had disappeared. The others had sloped off into the side streets, probably biding their time until the bunkhouse opened for the evening.

“What, Les?” David yanked his hand away from Les’s grip.

Les swiped at his arm again. “There’s a new mark!” he said, grinning like he had just found a dime on the pavement. “Look, your thumb!”

David’s face hardened, his hands compulsively tightening into fists by his side. “It’s probably just dirt or something. You know I don’t get marks anymore.” He refused to live for the next mark to appear on his skin. He had learnt that no matter how objective he said he was, it never truly stopped hurting when he thought he recognised something new, only to realise it was a smear of mud or coal.

Les shook his head and whined. “Really, Davey! Look!”

Sighing, David shook his head. “We should get home. See if Mama needs any help with anything.” He straightened his posture and began walking slowly in the direction of their apartment block. “C’mon, Les, we’re not standing around if nothing’s happening.”

Like the stubborn kid that David had always known him to be, Les scowled and rooted himself to the pavement. “I ain’t stupid! I know you don’t have a mark there!”

“I’m not,” David corrected automatically. He straightened his hands out in front of himself and looked at the dirt-streaked skin. The protest had made them all a little rougher and dirtier than normal. “See, perfectly normal. Let’s go, Les.”

Someone clapped their hand on David’s shoulder.

Whipping around like a firecracker, David came nose to nose with Race. “Aw, lighten up, Davey. He ain’t doin' no harm. Besides, what’s one more mark?”  

David frowned and glanced down at his hands again. “Don’t worry about it, Race. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Race said, clapping him a few times on the shoulder, but not actually moving away.  

Les stomped over to them and took David’s hand back, shoving it into Race’s face. “See, there’s a drop underneath his thumbnail, right? I’m not stupid, you’re just a _głupi_.”

Race nodded. “Sure, there’s a mark. Never heard of gaw-pi, though.”

David glanced at him doubtfully as Les went about explaining the Polish word. Looking more carefully, he could see the drop that Les had been talking about. Piercingly stark against his skin and definitely not there before; he could not have named every mark on his own body, but he certainly knew where they were not. David scratched at it with a nail, but it did not fade. Staring at it, he could not wrap his head around what he was seeing.  

It felt almost like an out-of-body experience, which, David knew, was ridiculous considering it was just one more teardrop to add to the others on his arm. But it had been so long since he had seen a new mark that it felt like he must be dreaming.

“Davey, you ‘right?” Race shook him roughly and Les grinned proudly.

“Yeah,” David murmured, voice so faint that he could barely hear himself.

Les turned towards Race conspiratorially. “He didn’t get a mark since he was nine.” His stage whisper was less than subtle, and Race blinked blankly a few times.

“Right. That’s a while…” Self-consciously, maybe, Race’s fingers ran over a few of his own marks that were scattered all across his arms.

Nodding enthusiastically, Les turned back to David. “See, I told you that they is alive!”

“They are.” David crossed his arms tightly over his chest and hid his thumb from his own sight. He did not know how to feel. Part of him was still frozen in shock that his soul mate was still alive and that they had gone six years without crying. Another part of him was despairing at how underwhelming it had been. One more teardrop – admittedly one more than David had come to ever expect – and he was absolutely no closer to finding his soulmate than he had been an hour ago without it.

Race patted his shoulder again. “Well, congrats and all, but I gotta find someplace before tonight. See ya's tomorrow.” Les waved excitedly and then turned to David with an expectant expression.

“Aren’t you happy?” he demanded.

David shrugged. Truthfully, he felt numb and slow, as if his brain had taffy in it. The more minutes that passed, the more he was coming to the horrible realisation that the new mark changed nothing. His soul mate was still somewhere, still alive. Although that was more than he knew yesterday, David could not find it within himself to be outwardly happy about it. “I guess.” He paused to look around. “We should go home.” He did not wait for Les’s reply to start walking.

Blank-faced and looking a little lost, Les trailed after David silently. Maybe he was as confused as David as to why there had been no big reaction to the mark. Les would not understand, though, David had long since concluded. His marks had always been regular. His arms were so crowded with drops that they had started to spot his chest and back.

They were above the fold on the newspaper the next day, and that was more important than any new mark that David had received. The tear mark drifted from his mind as he came to a bitter conclusion that he was no better with the mark than he had been without it.

The strike pressed on and David pushed the mark out of his head. There were better things to think about. Besides, a painful twang pulled in his chest whenever he looked at the new drop. He wished he could forget about it. So, he pushed it to the back of his mind and refused to look at his arms as much as possible. It was by no means the best coping mechanism, but it was the best he had.

Things went haywire with the strike and David was whisked up in a whirlwind of emotions, rallies and protests until he ended up in the office with Pulitzer, Spot and Jack. And, suddenly, it was over. It seemed all too soon; David could not understand how one minute he was in that office, the next he was surrounded by people celebrating and then, he was on the fire escape at his apartment, half asleep, with Jack next to him talking quietly about nothing.  

And then, Jack was crying. David reached a tentative hand around his back and rested his head on Jack’s shoulder. It was a silent comfort, but that seemed the most appropriate form that David could think of. Not everything needed to be talked about.

“We actually did it,” Jack said after a while, sniffling through his words. “We changed somethin’ in this stinkin’ world.”

David nodded, staring at his hands. There was a new dot swelling in size just above his wrist. He stared at it blearily as he listened to Jack working through everything going through his mind, his breathing still stilted from crying.

The mark kept growing, though, and David could not pull his eyes away from it. A distinctive teardrop shape began to curve its edges and shape the concave tip. Tiny and distinctive, there was no denying that it was another mark; the second in as many weeks.

David could not stop his lip from trembling. Over the course of the strike, an emotional backlog had been building up at the back of his mind that he had suppressed for far too long. It was inevitable that it would all come crashing down sooner or later. In the fire escape with Jack was not an ideal place, but his control over that was non-existent.

Jack jolted, cutting himself off mid-sentence and turned to look at David, eyes wide with surprise. “You ‘right, Davey?”

David tried to swallow the lump in his throat, but he had no reason to bother lying to Jack about the drop. He nodded and rubbed it. “New mark.”

Raising his eyebrows, Jack glanced at the spot David was massaging with his thumb. “D’ya normally cry when you gets a new one?"

It was a silly thing to cry about, David knew, but he could not stop the tears that began to leak out of his eyes. Sometimes that happened, though, and there was nothing that he could do to stop it. It was more common that David wanted to admit for some time small to set him off after a particularly trying period where he had held everything back.

“Oh, naw, don’t cry!” Jack said loudly, wiping his across his face with furious speed to dry any last trace of his tears

David cut him off quietly. “Two in two weeks. And none before that for six years.” He had to force the words out between choked breaths and muffled snuffling.

Jack went still and looked at his own hands, silent. David barely noticed as he continued to rub the new mark and talk down his own tears.

Jack tapped David on the shoulder and pointed to a spot growing in the crook of his elbow. Staring at it with wide eyes, David could not bring himself to think about what he was implying with that. He dragged fists over his eyes, drying his tears as well as he could before glancing at the mark, which was beginning to take on the appearance of a teardrop.

“Cryin’ on the streets don’t get you nowhere,” Jack said as if that was the perfect answer that David must have been looking for. He gave a fragile smile that was as brittle as the façade of laughter in his eyes.

David bent forwards and cradled his head in his arms as he fought back a new wave of tears, shoulders shaking with the effort of it. His mind had gone haywire and his stomach was like curdled cream. There was a tickling in his throat like he was going to be sick.

Slapping his back more gently than normal, Jack's voice took on a softer tone. “Don’t cry, Davey. I already got a good thousand marks from when you was a baby.”

David inhaled deeply, slowly working his breathing to a normal pace again. Jack moved jerkily next to him, darting between tracing his own marks and patting David’s back anxiously.

“You don’t... I mean, we don’t have to do anythin’, if you don’t wanna,” Jack suggested quietly when David had looked up again.

David swallowed. “That’s not... I was just shocked.” His voice was rough and low. “I don’t want to not...” He trailed off, unsure of where he was going with his sentence. Everything was slowly falling into place.

His soulmate was Jack. _Jack_. For a second, he hung in beautiful harmony with that idea. Even over the space of a few short months, David had come to trust him as much as he trusted his own family. If there was anyone who he was meant to be with, Jack somehow seemed a very suitable choice – someone who David was more than happy to spend his life with.

On the other hand, it was illegal. Soulmates who were homosexuals were not talked about. They had no marriage rights and when they were already condemned by society, few people would dare to fight for them in any case. If his soulmate was Jack, then he was at the mercy of the government.

David did his best to push those thoughts out of his head. Logically, he knew exactly what he might be facing, but it did not feel real. It was all so sudden. It was so much nicer to listen to the happy voice chirping in his ear, knowing that he had found his soulmate and _it was Jack._

“So, then, we's soulmates,” Jack said contemplatively.  “I can live with that.” 

David met his eyes and smiled. “Yeah...” he paused for a second, before continuing, “I’m glad it’s you.”

Jack stared into his eyes and the smile finally reached his eyes. “Yeah. Me, too, Davey.” He leaned in and gently kissed David’s forehead. “I think it sounds pretty damn good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so first off – no, I didn’t write anything _heavily_ romantic. Why? Primarily because I couldn’t find the words to drag it out to that. Secondly, because I can’t – personally – really imagine either Jack or Davey being heavily romantic literally seconds after finding out that they're soulmates, particularly at the canonical ages of 15 and 17 and in the social context. 
> 
> That being said, I love writing sappy stuff, so even if it isn't related to this specific au, you can bet that I'll be back with fluffy romance sooner or later. 
> 
> On another note, this is the first time I've published any newsies stuff, so tips and stuff on characterisation (and the bloody accents - how you do write a new york accent???) would really be appreciated! Comments are always loved, but you can also find me at: 
> 
> Tumblr: [zyva](https://must-be-brooklyn.tumblr.com)
> 
> So, I hope to see you again sooner or later and thank you for reading this <333  
> And, as I said before - Make your 2019 absolutely amazing!


End file.
